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REBECCA DROPPED the last armload of her clothes on Desmond's bed. Gillian had helped ferry things from one bedroom to the other, until Mrs. Waters became concerned that the girl was tiring herself out. So Rebecca had completed the last few trips on her own.
She looked around the bedroom. After tonight, it would be their room. A thrill of anticipation raced through her, and she glanced at her watch. Only eleven o'clock. Hours yet until they left for Las Vegas.
Hours. With no reason to hurry, she could take her time and thoroughly investigate the room. She smiled, looking forward to what she might learn about her husband-to-be.
Picking up an armload of socks, she walked over to the dresser. The ebony and inlaid green marble top shone from a recent cleaning. On the left side, a shallow stone bowl held a set of car keys, and a natural-bristle brush and double-toothed comb sat neatly beside it.
She dropped the socks on the empty right side of the dresser top, and turned her attention to the drawers. Three drawers wide, and three high, the black dresser bowed out in a graceful curve. The top three drawers were shorter than the others, and the center drawers were narrower, with the stylized curves of green marble that acted as drawer pulls sized accordingly. The top left drawer contained socks, and the center drawer held handkerchiefs.
Momentarily distracted from her quest for an empty drawer, she lifted up the socks and handkerchiefs to search beneath them. Nothing. Not that she'd really expected anything. Desmond was too clever, or too security conscious, to choose the most popular hiding place for personal valuables.
She opened the top right drawer and found it empty, so she swept her socks into it. The few pairs she'd packed for her trip seemed lost in the vastness of the drawer, and she couldn't wait until the rest of her things arrived from her apartment. Then she'd look like she belonged here.
The other two drawers on the left contained Desmond's turtlenecks, underwear, and a few plain white T-shirts. The four remaining drawers were bare, chilling Rebecca with an uneasy premonition. Had he already made space for Rebecca's things, or was he honoring his wife's memory by keeping the room the way it had been when they'd shared it? Rebecca knew how little time he'd had this past week. He hadn't done any reorganizing. They'd been his wife's, and he'd never filled them.
She hurried to the closet. The black sliding doors, set in both top and bottom tracks, glided smoothly at her touch. A thin strip of insulation kept the doors from touching, making their movement eerily silent. She pulled the chain on the overhead light bulb, illuminating a deep closet with a double row of clothes. The back row held darker, heavier suits and shirts, while the front held spring and summer clothing. Desmond had used both rows, rather than hanging anything on the other side of the closet.
Rebecca shoved open the other closet door, and hung as many of her clothes as she could on the empty bar. She even hung shirts and pants she'd normally fold and keep in a drawer. Anything to occupy that ominous space.
Trying to fill more space, she spread some of Desmond's suit coats further along the rack. Then she stopped, and really looked at them. She was no fashion expert, but she knew styles changed, lapels became wider or narrower, suits changed from single- to double-breasted and back. The suit
s hanging in this closet couldn't be more than five years old.
She flipped through the shirts, finding mostly washable silk and rayon blends no more than a few years old. The one exception was a dark green chamois shirt that looked well-worn. But she didn't know if it had come that way, like acid-washed jeans, or if it had actually been in service for more than five years.
She thought back on her discussion with Dr. Chen. He'd been one of the Institute's first researchers. And he'd been working there for five years.
Desmond had purchased an entire new wardrobe when he took this job as Director of the Institute. Why? What had he been before that? Rebecca didn't know, but she was certain it had something to do with the secret of his missing years, and why she'd been unable to find references to him in any of her normal background searches.
She sat down on the floor of the closet, appreciating the softness of the deep pile throw rug covering the wood, and tried to think this through. A pair of extra pillows lay in the corner of the closet, and she picked one up to lean against, revealing a brassbound travel case that had been hidden beneath the pillows.
She grabbed the case and examined it. Small, no more than a foot in each direction, the brass fittings and reinforcements made it heavy. The top clasps had keyholes indicating they could be locked, but when she touched them, they sprang open. A narrow tray, lined with velvet, held cuff links, tie tacks, and two antique pocket watches. Hooking her fingers into the loops on the sides of the tray, she lifted it out. The tray beneath held a variety of men's jewelry, from a delicately crafted gold watch chain to a chunky gold nugget bracelet of the kind that had been popular a few years back.
Intrigued, she pulled out that tray to see what was beneath it. A bulky suede bag filled the tray. She opened it and poured out a jumble of necklaces, earrings, pins and bracelets. Kitschy items from the dollar store mingled with items easily worth a few hundred dollars. Then she spotted a necklace whose delicate tracery spelled out "Olivia."
Rebecca crammed the jewelry back into the bag, tying it shut with a savage knot. The game had soured. She wasn't sure if she wanted to know more about Desmond's past. Not if it was a past that included another woman.
She might not want the information, but she needed to know it. You couldn't change the truth by pretending it was something else. Her mother had tried that, and look where it had gotten her. No, she had to know the answer, even if she didn't like it. Reaching into the case, she lifted out the tray.
The next tray held only construction paper cards from Gillian; Birthday, Christmas and Father's Day. Penciled in the corner of each card was a notation, such as "Gillian at 2 years."
She broke off her investigation of the box to compare the writing on the cards. It was obviously penned by the same hand, in a perfect antique bookplate script. She'd suspected Desmond of taking voice lessons to disguise his accent. Had he also studied calligraphy to disguise the personality clues inherent in handwriting?
She'd hoped to learn answers to her existing questions, not uncover more puzzles. Desmond managed to overturn her plans again, without even knowing. With a sigh, she replaced the cards and turned back to the travel box.
The next tray was empty, with no loops to lift it out by. It had to be the bottom level. Rebecca glanced at the outside of the case, then measured the depth of the tray with her hand against the outside wall. No, there was still room for one more tray below this one.
She sunk her nails into the velvet corners and pulled. Moving at a grinding slowness, the tray slid up the walls of the case and popped out. She peered inside. A gray and maroon cloth, the kind sold on late night television to preserve silver services, shrouded a thin rectangle. She lifted out the bundle and unwrapped an antique silver picture frame.
The picture seemed equally ancient, a family portrait of stern, unsmiling people. A middle-aged woman garbed in a dark burgundy gown and a younger woman in a similar gown of shimmering lavender sat in two high backed velvet chairs, flanked by two young men standing at stiff attention. Two boys, one a teenager and the other still a child, sat on stools in the very front. The detail of the picture was incredible. Rebecca could see the pattern of the women's lace collars and count the hairs in the teenager's unruly cowlick.
But who were they? The men's features were similar to Desmond's, and the young lady in the middle bore a striking resemblance to Gillian, so they were obviously relatives. Rebecca's attention was caught by the expression of the youngest boy. Although his face was as unmoving as the others, his eyes blazed with the hunger of barely restrained curiosity as he stared at the photographer. She recognized the expression, just as she recognized the same hunger to know more in the man's library shelves filled with science fiction and popular science books. The boy was Desmond.
Rebecca put names to the other faces. His mother and Veronica in the middle. The older son, with the stern expression, was Etienne. The younger one, with a slightly bruised expression, as if the world had hurt him badly and he hadn't quite recovered, must be Roderick. The teenager perched precariously on the edge of his stool had to be Jean-Michel. But what were they doing in such ridiculously old-fashioned clothes?
She frowned, trying to remember other old photographs she'd seen. They'd been brown, and rather blurry. Not crisp and in color like this. So it must be a new picture, with the family dressed in old clothes for some reason.
Of course. Historical sites had photographers that would take your picture in antique costumes. This must be a souvenir from a family vacation. If the rest of his family was as adverse to photographs as Desmond, this might be the only picture he had of them. Carefully rewrapping the heavy frame in its protective cloth, Rebecca replaced the picture where she'd found it. Then she replaced the other trays, and finally put the pillow back on top of the case. Her intuition told her she'd just learned something important, but Rebecca had no idea what it was.
